Community participation - Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Network dynamics: explaining the pattern
detect any eagerness on the part of newcomers to take on new governance roles
and proceed to try to fill the gap themselves (‘Most people just don’t want to turn up
to things’, said one interviewee); non-participants observe that, whenever a new role
opens up, it always seems to get filled by one of the usual suspects and don’t bother
putting their hat in the ring.
The attitudes that underpin these expectations can actually vary considerably. For
non-participants it can take the form of over-reliance (‘I don’t need to get involved
because people like X will be’) or apathy (‘There’s no point in trying to get involved
because people like X will already have it sewn up’). For participants it can take the
form of self-aggrandisement (‘I had the skills and experience so naturally I became
the secretary’) or deep frustration (‘If I don’t do it no one else will; I’m the only one
trying to make sure our voice is heard’). But what is potent about the community
dependency dynamic is that it still operates irrespective of which combination of
these distinctive positions underpins the behaviour of participants and nonparticipants.
Institutional dependency
‘There is a tendency to overuse the key people’, says Tracey, explaining how
institutions themselves also play a key part in fostering a culture of dependency on a
small community elite. ‘As soon as you start going to one meeting or other the
vultures come in.’ Community participation is often conceived by institutions as an
instrumental problem of compliance rather than as a normative problem of
democratic rights or a substantive problem of effective and legitimate decision
making. As Taylor explains:
… [institutional partners] want community participants to be
representative and accountable to communities, but there is a culture of
delivery about partnerships and partners want representatives to ‘deliver
their communities’. 21
The result is often a temptation to go for the quick fix of recruiting an existing
community governor who is a known quantity and can be trusted to understand and
work within the constraints of a demanding delivery environment, rather than to
invest scarce time and resources in attracting new blood who will take time to settle
in and may not ever develop the right kind of working relationship. ‘Once you see
someone who’s half-decent you try and get them involved in other things’, says
Tracey.
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